LACMA

race relations in the United States were uppermost in Jauregui's thoughts, but he elected to express his concerns abstractly. Each drawing features an arrangement of parallel bands in vanishing two-point perspective that patently reads as architectural form, such as a corner of a building, even though nothing architectural is actually depicted. He deranges the regularity of the strict rectilinear geometry with rupturing voids, wild scumbles, and a besmirching film of ash mixed with water, all of which puts the gridular visual logic into a state of disarray. If Jauregui's earlier works depicted fantastical, nightmarish images, his recent drawings suggest abstracted allegories of predictability and certitude destabilized. He thus explores an intensely aestheticized expression of racial, social, cultural, and psychological tensions in contemporary American life. It is not certain that Jauregui will continue to work exclusively in this formally abstract vein, but the issues that impel him, as well as the indirectness of his methods, are very much in the spirit of Phantom Sightings. — HOWARD N. FOX Many of the artists in Phantom Sightings who cite the precedents of Asco as influential on their own practice engage in activities that actually transpire in public places or that are distinctly positioned in contexts and histories outside of studio-bound artistic concerns. Danny Jauregui, who in fact does affirm the relevance of Asco to his own art, is the exception—a studio artist whose paintings and sculptures are largely indoor and personal. Yet his deepest concerns, while often expressed allegor- ically in abstract modes, are ones shared by all of the artists in this exhibition. A looming sense of instability, a vague aura of impending disruption, and a hint of anxiety have haunted Jauregui's art from the outset. A series titled Failed Sculpture (2005) is actually a group of photographs depicting the artist's family at home; in one, his parents hold a painted papier-mâché volcano, its cone running over; in another, the living room is improbably occupied by a mass of bubbling lava; a third presents a model of a typical front door standing in the middle of the room, and melting, as if it were made of wax. A rumbling volcano in the living room, percolating lava, a front door (everyone's bastion of household security) in dissolution—these are the imagery of bad dreams. Jauregui exacerbated the theme of imperiled domesticity in his House Alchemy series of drawings (2005). He provokes a tension between his quite realistic, matter-of-fact renderings of typical California suburban ranch houses and the fantastical circumstance in which he presents them: each is depicted on a plot of soil that inexplicably has been ripped out of terra firma, torn from the very ground that should be its bosom, as the whole clump—house, moorings, underground roots, and all the life in, around, or under the home—slides into a free fall into empty space. These houses themselves are perfectly intact—the very emblem of domestic stability and security—yet the viewer understands them as plunging to inevitable, imminent doom in a cosmic void. In 2006, Jauregui moved away from such literal (if nevertheless uncanny) depictions to a more oblique, subliminal approach. His four-part series Stage Set for a Riot (or, Whatever Happened to Mt. Vesuvius?) was specifically inspired by his impressions of the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles, when four policemen were acquitted in the videotaped beating of Rodney King. The incident, replete with its underlying racism and that of the social upheaval it wrought, and the reverberating consequences for 165 DANNY JAUREGUI

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